A/N: So, this is my first completed Doctor Who fanfic, and I really wasn't planning to write it, but the idea came to me about a week ago while I was washing dishes, and I wrote it over the next two days. Anyway. I hope you enjoy it, and I'd love to hear what you think of it, whether I got the characters right, and so on. I apologize for any mistakes in grammar. And of course, I do not own Doctor Who. The writing however, is mine.
She never tells him that her favorite part of making souffles is the clean up.
Oh, she's always liked washing dishes. There's something about it that soothes her. Maybe it's the warm water, or the memories it evokes of playing with suds and bubbles in the sink with her mother as a child. Whatever the reason, the Maitlands learned long ago that it's best when Clara is upset to leave the kitchen because Clara the cleaning whirlwind is coming along to leave a spotless, sparkling kitchen in her wake.
But it's not until she begins spending time on the TARDIS that she truly grows to love it.
There's the time she bakes a souffle after a particularly arduous adventure. She places the souffle in the oven, seats herself at the kitchen table, and promptly falls asleep. When she awakes, the room is filled with smoke and the Doctor is wading through it with eyes like saucers darting from her to the smoking oven. He pulls the charred remnants from the oven and thrusts them into the sink, then grabs her hand and tows her from the room at breakneck pace. When they are safely in the library, clear on the other side of the TARDIS (although she rather thinks the TARDIS doesn't quite have sides) he releases her hand, steps away, and squares his shoulders.
Then he hesitates, his hands fluttering about for a moment, eyes focused on her, and yet somehow avoiding meeting hers directly, and then he stretches himself to his full height (which really isn't necessary given Clara is quite lacking in that department.)
"Clara!" he exclaims finally, the muscle in his jaw twitching a little. "What were you thinking?"
"I wasn't. I was sleeping." she responds, a bit impertinently.
When one of his hands finds his bow tie and tugs on it indignantly, she figures that probably wasn't the wisest response, but it is such fun to see him riled up.
"I didn't mean to fall asleep Doctor," she amends.
He opens and closes his mouth a few times, before he finally settles on, "Has it occurred to you the treatment of her kitchen might be the reason the TARDIS doesn't like you?"
And suddenly, she's laughing, big, overwhelming belly laughs because his arms are waving and he looks so bemused and flustered and a little bit peeved and he still has the damn oven mitt on one of his flailing hands.
And then he is laughing too.
Another time, he finds her in another of the TARDIS kitchens (neither of them have yet dared venture into the first after the prior incident) pulling a souffle from the oven. He watches as her smile fades, and her face crumples, and then, quite unexpectedly she begins to sniffle. He debates for a moment, then clears his throat to alert her of his presence, and she wipes surreptitiously at her eyes as he crosses the kitchen to peer over her shoulder at the souffle she has now placed on the counter. Miraculously it isn't even a bit burnt. It is, however, sunken in and rather misshapen.
"It didn't turn out. Again." she says quietly, and there's a defeated quality to it he really doesn't like, so he flashes her one of his slightly manic grins, and in an attempt to put things in perspective, tells her,"It's just a souffle."
"But it's not just a souffle!" She explodes, and that's when the tears begin to brim in her eyes and she twists her mother's ring on her finger, and his eyes grow wide. Suddenly, things begin adding themselves up in his head, how subdued she's been all day, the pointed looks Angie kept giving him when he picked Clara up this morning.
"Oh. Oh." He looks rightly repentant then, clapping a hand to his forehead at his own utter pigheadedness.
"Oh, Clara. I'm so sorry. I didn't know." he almost whispers as he clasps her hands in his.
She shakes her head, her eyes welling with tears at the tenderness in his voice. "Of course not. How could you know?" He thinks that perhaps now is not the best time to tell her he was at her mother's funeral, so raises his hand to her face and halts a rivulet that makes it's way down her cheek with his index finger and then, as she begins to cry in earnest he gathers her into a hug and pats her back, albeit a bit awkwardly, but at least he's trying.
When her tears have ceased, she pulls back from him and glances over at the souffle. "I was really going to get it right today," she tells him mournfully.
"It might still taste good," he ventures.
And it does.
Once, she makes a really terrible mess, not just of the dishes, not even of just the counters, but of the floor, the walls, and even herself. She's not sure how she did it. No clue really. Nothing's gone her way today. But here she is, flour on every bit of flat surface, up to her elbows in soapy water as she scrubs raw egg off her arms. He pokes his head around the door frame, a bit cautiously, she notes. Slowly, comically, his mouth falls open, and as he shifts the rest of his lanky frame into the doorway she can't help but giggle at him.
"Oh, dear." he breathes, "Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear." The words run together in a low murmur that's somewhere between exasperation and reverence. And then his eyes find her, scanning up and down, cataloguing rumpled clothes and a face half covered in some sort of white substance.
"Did you - did you kill something in here?" he asks eventually, and he gives her that look of wonder that's reserved for strange new alien life forms and creations and she doesn't know whether to be flattered or offended.
"Er. No, sorry?" she tries, drying her hands on a dish towel and searching in vain for a clean bit of counter on which to place it but she settles for twisting it nervously in her hands. For all that she likes to push his buttons, she does so gently, and she doesn't want to make him truly angry. Bracing herself, she lifts her chin stubbornly, and stretches to every last bit of her five foot two inch height, meets his eyes daringly, and discovers they are dancing with mirth. Between that and the grin threatening to split his face in two, he's all but laughing at her.
He takes pity on her, and together they clean the kitchen. ("Can't you just sonic it?" "It's not magic, Clara.") Somewhere toward the end, he bends to pull her to her feet from scrubbing the yellow tile floor and she finds him studying a spot on her left cheek appraisingly. And then, before she has a chance to absorb what is happening, his tongue darts out and he licks a bit of confectioner's sugar off her cheek. He freezes, eyes darting side to side, mouth opening and closing briefly as his face blooms with crimson, and she's dismayed to feel heat rising in her own face. Although, as covered as it is in sugar and flour and who knows what else, perhaps he can't tell.
"I. I've got to - temporal reactor thingy. Spacey wacey," he mumbles, turns on his heel and flees from the room in such haste he nearly trips over his own feet and she's left standing in the newly clean kitchen, gaping after him with a burning souffle in the oven.
He can't form a proper sentence in her presence for at least the following four hours.
She asks him once to help her bake one, but he tells her piously, "No Clara. This is something you have to learn for yourself." She has an inkling it's because he likes the aftermath of her failures, but she can't be sure. She hopes so.
Now, she stands here in the TARDIS console room, her arms crossed over her chest, fingers digging painfully into her flesh as she seeks desperately to keep herself from shattering into so many more pieces than she will ever be able to put back together. It's hard to see now, through the tears that swim in her eyes and obscure her vision, yet still she watches, the man before her flaming with golden light. Every cell in his body is rewriting itself, scrubbing this Doctor, her Doctor from existence and replacing him with a stranger. And this is when she realizes.
She never told him that her favorite part of making souffles is the clean up.